The "data hub" concept is about organizing custom tracks in a tidy way and the ability of batch upload. User can prepare a data hub to host bedGraph or SAM tracks generated from her experiments, write up some metadata terms, and bring it up on the browser via one single mouse click.

The benefit

Batch uploading (eliminating the labor of manual uploading one each time)

Custom track information are made persistent (encoded in a hub descriptor file)

Track files don't have to be on the same web server

All types of tracks can be annotated by custom metadata

With a datahub you can configure:

Default track display mode (you can have some of the tracks turned on by default while keep the rest hidden)

Default rendering style (this feature is still been worked on but you can control some key styles e.g. color and height)

Submitting a sample datahub

On the toolbox panel click button CustomTK, the Custom track submission panel will be displayed:

As displayed in above screen shot, the hg19 sample hub contains many tracks, including 4 heatmap tracks (in blue), one bed track named "mattress", one long-range interaction track named "fractal globule", and one BAM track named "tempest". It also contains two metadata terms shown as two columns in the metadata color map. The heatmap tracks are annotated by the terms.

Go back to the "Custom track" control panel:

This time select button "Manage". The number in parenthesis tells number of custom tracks that have been registered in the management table, it increments when more tracks are added. The table would look like below:

Creating your own datahub

You need to create a hub descriptor file , place it on your web server, and that's all.

The file is a simple text file. It is line-oriented and tab-delimited. Each line defines a track or a metadata term. Each type of track might require different number of fields to describe itself.

As you've already seen from the custom track panel, five types of custom tracks are available to be included in your data hub: